Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?

[brian3795]

Rookie team here, still trying to sort things out. One of our mentors proposed an intriguing idea: Build a "practice bot" almost identical to our primary bot to give us something to practice with during the month of downtime between the robot ship date and competition.

We found nothing explicitly prohibiting this in the rules. Is this something that other teams routinely do? (Still waiting for our "mentor" team to be assigned...actually, we've pretty much given up on that happening!)